Email has become a common tool with respect to business communication. Other types of electronic messages such as instant messages, text messages, and social networking posts are catching up fast. Email can be an efficient communication mechanism, for example, when sending a message to a limited or large number of recipients, who may be near the sender's work location or across the globe. The recipients of a message can then add further recipients to the communication, reply “to all” or to a few, and propagate these messages.
Unfortunately, the ease of using email can also make it into a nuisance. It is not uncommon that users receive hundreds of emails a week, some or even many of which they do not need to receive or have low relevance. By some estimates about 10% of employee time is being wasted in attending to unnecessary internal emails. In many cases, such emails cannot be filtered as effectively as external junk emails. With many email participants clicking the “reply-all” button, the recipients of these emails can become victims of email overload.
Conventional attempts to address these issues are inefficient, ineffective and/or have undesirable side effects or other drawbacks with respect to at least one significant use case.
For example, some electronic messaging management tools have functionality such as “kill an email thread” or “mute an email thread.” However the other participants of the conversation do not become aware when one or more of the recipients are ignoring the conversation. As another example, some electronic messaging management tools attempt to inform subsequent repliers when they attempt to send an email to someone who has unsubscribed to the thread. However, thread participants do not know such information unless they have opted to send an email. As yet another example, some electronic messaging management tools send emails to all participants when one of the participants “opts out” from a message thread. However, this can actually create more traffic for the remaining participants, potentially causing more harm than good.
Embodiments of the invention are directed toward solving these and other problems individually and collectively.